The second witness was Melvin. My husband.
He was sitting in a folding chair by the porch rail with a plastic cup of Reggies wine, because I had told him to come and be civil, and now forty people were staring at him and he had no idea why.
I knew Melvin had never witnessed a will. Melvin had never witnessed anything more serious than a church raffle. And I knew, as sure as I knew my own name, that he had not been in a room with Edith and Reggie and a lawyer signing papers, because for six years every Sunday he had sat in the car outside her house with the radio on while I did her hair.
So I asked Judith to read the date on the second will. She did. It was dated the week of the funeral.
Edith passed on a Tuesday. The funeral was Saturday. There was a luncheon after at the church hall on Abercorn, and at the door of that luncheon Reggie had stood with a clipboard and a pen, asking every person who came in to sign the family book so Aunt Edith could be remembered.
Melvin signed it. I watched him do it. I signed it too, right above him.
Reggie had taken the signature page out of that book and stapled it to the back of a will he typed himself.
I said all of this out loud on the porch, and the cousins from Brunswick, who had also signed that book, went very still, because they understood what I was telling them. Any one of their names could have been on that page.
Judith, on the speaker, said she would be flagging the petition for the probate judge that afternoon.
Reggie had not needed to forge a single signature, because he had collected two hundred real ones at his aunts funeral and kept the page.
What I learned over the next month is that Georgia takes this seriously. A will has to be signed by the person making it in front of two witnesses, and the witnesses have to sign in front of her. Edith had been in the ground four days when Melvin wrote his name on that page. The judge did not need a handwriting expert. He needed a calendar.
Reggies lawyer withdrew the petition before the hearing. I was told that was the lawyers idea, not Reggies, because a lawyer who stays attached to a forged will stops being a lawyer.
The district attorney took it from there. Reggie was charged with forgery and with attempting to file a false instrument. He pleaded. There was probation and a fine, and there is a record now, and there is no vacation rental.
The deposited will, the real one, was admitted in March. The house on East Gaston Street is mine. So is the furniture Reggie had hauled to the carriage house, which Melvin and the Brunswick cousins carried back in over one long Saturday.
Melvin took it harder than I did. He said he had signed his name for a dead woman he loved and a thief had turned it into a lie. I told him the thief was the one who had to answer for that, not the man who signed the book.
I had the loose shutter fixed in April. Then I thought about it and had the man put it back the way it was. Loose, second from the back. Edith would have wanted it that way, and I have a feeling I may need it someday for a girl of my own.
The housecoat, I washed and folded and put in her cedar chest. Reggie had left it on the porch rail the night of the party. He did not come back for anything.